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No healthy man, in his secret heart, is content with his destiny. He is tortured by dreams and images as a child is tortured by the thought of a state of existence in which it would live in a candy store and have two stomachs.

H. L. Mencken

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H. L. Mencken
Age: 75 †
Born: 1880
Born: September 12
Died: 1956
Died: January 29
Autobiographer
Essayist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Literary Critic
Satirist
Social Critic
Writer
Baltimore
Maryland
Henry Louis Mencken
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Children
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Store
Heart
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Tortured
States
Healthy
Discontent

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All great religions, in order to escape absurdity, have to admit a dilution of agnosticism. It is only the savage, whether of the African bush or the American gospel tent, who pretends to know the will and intent of God exactly and completely.
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What men value in this world is not rights but privileges.
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When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.
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A professional politician is a professionally dishonorable man. In order to get anywhere near high office he has to make so many compromises and submit to so many humiliations that he becomes indistinguishable from a streetwalker.
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Why writers write I do not know. As well ask why a hen lays an egg or why a cow stands patiently while an underprivileged farmer burglarizes her.
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Religion, after all, is nothing but an hypothesis framed to account for what is evidentially unaccounted for.
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There are no institutions in America: there are only fashions.
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Man is always looking for someone to boast to woman is always looking for a shoulder to put her head on.
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In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
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Temptation is an irresistible force at work on a movable body.
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In every woman's life there is one real and consuming love. But very few women guess which one it is.
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Our literature, despite several false starts that promised much, is chiefly remarkable, now as always, for its respectable mediocrity.
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